An Open Letter on Why I am Demonstrating at the Colorado Capital

To the esteemed citizens and residents of Colorado:

I am a teacher and on Friday, April 27th, 2018, I will demonstrate with thousands of my colleagues at our State Capital in Denver. I am excited about the collective energy, but I want to tell you that I would much rather be in class with my students. Not because my job is easy, but exactly because it is hard. The success of my students is the center of my life. I love my family most, but my weakness is I leave the best part of myself at my school.

So, to explain this action, I want to clarify some things, because there is a lot of misunderstanding out there. This is not a strike. This is not a walkout. I am not in conflict with my employers, and I am not unhappy with my career. I am using my own earned general leave time with the approval of my school and district leadership to fulfill my responsibility as an education advocate for the good of my students, your and my children included.

Yes, there are personal stakes for me and my family. Teachers have lost ground for a decade. Since 2008, we have endured years of pay freezes, increases in our share of health insurance premiums, additional uncompensated work responsibilities, larger class sizes and reductions in retirement benefits. There has been no recovery for teachers and other workers since the Great Recession. Now, the cuts continue despite a booming economy in Colorado. What will happen in the next recession?

But the stakes are higher than just my job. High quality, universal and public education are necessary for the reproduction of healthy, happy and honorable society. To attract the best of the rising generation, we must provide districts with the funding they need to properly compensate and supply all of our teachers. It is something all Coloradans benefit from, whether or not they have their own children in public school. Do we want everyone in our state to be skilled and informed, or don’t we? And we need to keep attracting the warmest hearts and brightest minds to the teaching profession. This is not distant or theoretical. We hire for hard to fill positions every year, and new candidates are getting increasingly hard to find.

What we are demanding is for the Colorado legislature to prioritize the education of children. In Colorado, state tax increases must be approved by a statewide popular vote, but corporate tax giveaways are simple legislative matters. This has constricted the state budget year after year, and education funding has been the shrinking waist of fiscal belt-tightening. Eventually, a statewide vote will be needed to increase revenue through taxation in order to properly run all the needs of the state budget. But, meanwhile, education funding has to be the clear priority. They can do that by committing state budget increases to education at an expeditious rate, at least until education is funded at pre-recession levels. The crisis is here, and now the population knows it. This will go a very long way to a thorough solution through popular sovereignty by voting.

We can make a difference, but only together. This is not a group of selfish interests grasping for what others need. This is the servants of the beloved community standing up bravely for the interests of the vast majority, and for the future. This is a movement not just for teachers, but for all families, workers, and everyone who wants a brighter, more educated future, where everyone is included. Join us please, if you can. If you live in Colorado, call your state representatives to ask where they stand on education funding and demand they make it a priority. https://leg.colorado.gov/find-my-legislator  It will make you feel good to be involved because your voice is power, and “We the People” are strong. Then, on election day, vote.

With sincere thanks to you, and to my teachers who taught me,

Kevin O'Donnell

I am at the Colorado Sate Capital building
with thousands of my colleagues to lobby lawmakers
to make the education of children a priority, holding the sign I made
with materials repurposed from the recycling bin!

Past, Present, Future, or From God and Back Again

     This acrylic on canvas painting is an expression of my struggles with anxiety. The colors and paths have symbolic meaning to me, but I prefer to keep my interpretation to myself here so viewers may make their own meanings of the piece if they wish. In fact, my own interpretation changes over time and from viewing to viewing. So much so that I find it difficult to even settle on a title. One working title, while I was creating it, was "How Not to Commit Suicide." I'm glad to say I have made progress since those difficult days. I spent dozens of hours, over a span of two years, in its creation - hours of therapeutic meditation, painting over the canvas, again and again, not so much to refine the image, as to more deeply experience the process. These days, when I behold the lines, fields and strands, I soak in an awareness of the resilience I have recovered and strength I have gained from my experience. What it reminds me most of is the truth that no moment lasts forever; everything changes, which now gives me hope.

Coming out of Warsaw Central Station, or Dworzec

     The Warsaw Central Station received his curiosity like a birthing pain; it spilled out. Sleepless since at least Berlin, and before that, too, he, bleary eyed, glanced at signs which held their meanings from him. Better follow the flow of people past the tumbling tracks, escalator up, to lighter hallways and different smells (not burning oil and brake heated iron, but sickly sweet body odor, his own first, then stronger past the standing bag keepers, breezes wafting exhaust from open doors and cigarette smoke) through fricative and sibilant announcements. "Dong-Ding. Ishka. Hiss. Dvashets loodie. Terrace each a Poe Chong. Nack-oh nyets. Dong-Ding. The shape of the sound and the feel of the smell will be the signature of Poland for him. The endorsement on the check of an overdrawn account of experiences, which the tellers have not caught but keep providing.

Concrete colors filled his vision - light grey blocks, both of sidewalk and apartments, waves of black asphalt undulating under moving mountains of rubber bus tire. The bright white cloud cover cast shadows where no sun shines. Dirt muted car colors weave behind the billows of sooty particulant  clouds. Long plazas take his legs several thoughts away to reach the other side. This will become his mental map. But now it is still . . . . He looks with wide eyes.

Twin towers of the span of time framed the view. On the one hand, the Palace of Culture, paeon to Communism, filled with unseen iron behind a pressed and sculptures monotone of rock, and Stalin's gift, filled with unmentionable irony. On the other, the Hotel Marriott, rising streams of blue glass shimmering like clean water and money, so easy to see yet hard to find, proving the regime of the Washington Consensus, just out of reach. But at the moment he had a notion that he keep grab them both with his hands as he stood at the steps of the Warsaw Central Station. (From a memory of 1994)